by Omar (@siegarettes)

Spoilers for the early chapters of Wolfenstein follow. No seriously, I’ve warned you:

There’s a moment in Wolfenstein where BJ Blazkowicz struggles to get to grips with a modern coffee machine. It’s a short, humorous vignette that is interrupted by a Nazi officer questioning you. Afterward there is an abrupt and brief sex scene, which then match cuts the image of Anya’s exposed back to a scene where they plot to infiltrate a prison from a nearby hotel room. BJ narrates the scene leading up to the prison in gravelly tone that makes it feel like a movie trailer. A half hour later and you’re blowing off Nazi heads and limbs with dual-wielding shotguns.

That’s illustrative of the kind of strange shifts in mood that are common in Wolfenstein. It’s a poster child for gameplay-narrative segregation, a game that inherits the hyper-violent murder fantasy of the genre progenitor and builds a fleshy world on top of the skeleton framework of it. It’s a game that is excellent in areas it has no business being in. 

The action scenes would feel at home in a exploitation film. This a world where Nazis have taken over the world with future tech straight out of secret weapons files. Cyborg hounds prowl the halls of their sick inducing concrete compounds. They are the most terrifying canines since Modern Warfare. Horrid crimes are committed in the name of science. Then we’re back to quiet time. 

We talk to characters that are beautifully modeled, expressive in action and dialogue. There’s an almost naturalistic banter, scrubbed with the exaggerated vernacular of cinema. Characters are a step removed from archetypes, clearly defined by their narrative roles yet detailed enough to feel distinct. They have backstories and quirks, visible mannerisms.

There’s a scene early in the game where Blazkowicz speaks to Anya in her native tongue. He speaks an accented Polish, unconfident in his pronunciation and knowledge. It speaks to his origin, a man aware of his Polish heritage, though distinctly a cultural American. Despite being the shooter prototype, the Caucasian that is simultaneously the everyman and an unstoppable murder machine, Blazkowicz has somehow been made into a human being. 

Later on, Blazkowicz, Anya, and her parents all sit together at a table. They hold hands and recite a prayer before embarking on their dangerous venture into Nazi territory. It struck me as a distinctly human moment. There is a sense that videogames have often avoided any sort of political or religious exploration. An absurd desire to be apolitical despite being wrapped in the trappings of very real conflicts inseparable from the political, religious, and moral motivations that drive them. The scene is brief but feels real because it doesn’t hide religion in the way that many games do, passing over it or replacing it with fictional analogues. It’s just there, a part of the human experience. 

It’s a simple acknowledgement that’s easily found in other media, but it feels significant here. Admittedly, I’m speaking out of my depth here, but from what I’ve seen in my friends’ lives, religion, mainly Catholicism, seems to be entwined with the Polish identity. So it seemed only right for it to be there, however brief.

The aforementioned coffee, interrogation, and sex scene even seems almost justified. It’s abrupt, jarring, and quick to change in tone, but within the game fiction it almost feels right. It’s a glimpse into how the Nazi regime intrudes into daily life, an expression of the need for intimacy and connection in the face of horror. It doesn’t quite work, but in a way it feels more natural than they way most games deal with it. The dialogue leading up to it, hesitant yet inevitable, feels if not realistic, then at least believable. 

Scenes like that feel right, at least in the world that Wolfenstein exists in. A world thought out and detailed enough that it even includes a Nazi replacement of The Beatles, alongside a splatter of reworked anthems that pervert the era’s musical styles. The world exists mostly in a series of connected rooms and corridors, but there’s a sense that there is a world outside of those walls, if only you could escape to it.